Parody of the Yugao Chapter of the Tale of Genji

An ōban triptych of c. 1795–1797 in the Art Institute of Chicago, this design is a textbook mitate-e: the Yūgao (Evening Faces) chapter of Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji — in which Prince Genji becomes entranced by a fragile lower-class beauty who dies under mysterious circumstances — recast in the costumes and settings of the contemporary floating world. The original eleventh-century narrative is alluded to through compositional cues — a thatched fence, the gourd-flower vines that give the chapter its name — while the figures themselves wear up-to-date 1790s kimono and adopt the bodily mannerisms of contemporary courtesans. This conjunction of classical literary respectability with Yoshiwara glamour was a defining trick of the Eishi school and helped position bijin-ga as a sophisticated, not merely titillating, art.